Poka Labs Builds AI Operating System for Chemical Manufacturing, Opens Engineering Roles

Poka Labs, an enterprise software company founded in 2023 and backed by Y Combinator's S24 batch, is expanding its San Francisco engineering and deployment team. The seed-stage company, which operates with three employees, is hiring across five positions to scale production AI agents that automate pricing, quoting, and workflows for chemical manufacturing facilities.

Backed by investors including Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, Flybridge, and Pioneer Fund, Poka Labs bills its platform as a modern operating system for the chemical sector. Chemical manufacturing businesses often navigate complex quoting workflows and variable raw material pricing, relying heavily on legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, spreadsheets, and manual calculations. Poka Labs develops AI agents that sit on top of these customer systems to automate quoting and cross-selling.

Chemical Operations Paired with Infrastructure Engineering

Poka Labs was co-founded by Chief Executive Officer Malay Shah and Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bass.

Shah holds degrees in Chemical Engineering and Economics from North Carolina State University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Before founding Poka Labs, he worked across specialty chemical plants in the United States, Germany, and China in operations and engineering capacities. In those roles, Shah deployed advanced analytics alongside plant-floor domain knowledge to cut tens of millions of dollars in operational costs.

Bass leads technical development. Prior to Poka Labs, he built critical data infrastructure at Meta and worked on optimization software at a venture-backed startup acquired after helping mobility businesses raise revenue by 40%. He holds an MS and MBA from Harvard, where his research centered on machine learning systems.

Automating Quotes and Integrations on the Factory Floor

The company's immediate product focus centers on AI pricing and quoting agents used directly by plant managers and commercial sales teams. Deploying software into chemical plants requires deep integration with existing software stacks, including on-premise and cloud ERPs and customer relationship management (CRM) tools.

To handle integration and customer delivery, the company is recruiting an Enterprise Implementation Engineer ($160,000 to $220,000). This engineer will plan and build integrations directly linking Poka Labs' pricing agents to customer ERP and CRM databases. The role operates on-site in San Francisco to collaborate with the core engineering group.

Alongside implementation engineering, Poka Labs is hiring a Founding Deployment Strategist ($140,000 to $200,000). This position sits between plant operators and the engineering group, mapping customer data and operational workflows into the AI product post-sale. The role involves up to 25% travel to customer sites.

Expansion Across Core Engineering and Design

Poka Labs is also staffing its core engineering team with two full-stack roles focused on zero-to-one architecture. The Fullstack/AI Engineer role ($120,000 to $170,000) targets early-career engineers tasked with owning ambiguous technical areas and building production AI agents for quotes and pricing alongside the founders. For candidates with more experience, the Fullstack / AI Engineer (4+ YOE) opening ($180,000 to $240,000) focuses on architecting agents that automate pricing, quoting, and cross-sell capabilities for complex manufacturing clients.

To refine how operators interact with these models, the company has also opened a contract position for a Product Designer (Contract) paying $4,000 to $7,000 per month. Working directly with Bass, the designer will turn complex industrial operational requirements into workflows and interface designs ready for implementation.

All open positions are based on-site at Poka Labs' office in San Francisco.

Open Roles at Poka Labs

See all open roles at Poka Labs